Sholto David

Today I am sharing a new preprint and accompanying blog post. Hundreds of published papers include impossible western blots showing protein expression in cell lines that have deleted or mutated genes. These clumsy mistakes are widespread and repeated by LLMs.

As an example the PC-3 cell line has a complete deletion of the STAT3 gene. I was able to identify 37 papers that presented a STAT3 western blot in this cell line anyway.

Today I am sharing a new preprint and accompanying blog post. Hundreds of published papers include impossible western blots showing protein expression in cell lines that have deleted or mutated genes. These clumsy mistakes are widespread and repeated by LLMs.

Today I'm posting a new video to my YouTube channel. Over 100 toxicology research papers, mostly published by Egyptian labs, include fabricated images of comet assays! youtu.be/s2ul4tBMzbs

Four of these studies were cited by the European Food Safety Authority's assessment of the safety of Titanium Dioxide as a food additive, although they do not appear to have influenced the result.

Today I'm posting a new video to my YouTube channel! I am revisiting the story of Sam S. Yoon who was a top cancer surgeon in New York. My investigation led to the retraction of twenty cancer research papers: youtu.be/hWKvLAM7QNI

Authors include an employee of a Romanian seat belt manufacturer. Doesn't inspire confidence.

Today I'm posting a new video about a team of ophthalmology researchers in Germany who scribbled on their figures! t.co/X2U6zCw9pn

Is anyone good at these? Is this photo from a recent Frontiers in Medicine case report AI generated/modified? Anything you can point to specifically? (10.3389/fmed.2026.1915046)

Today I'm posting a video about Neurodigitech LLC which has provided clearly photoshopped neurons to research teams that published these images in Nature, JBC, and more. A year after I uncovered this only one paper has been corrected. It's in Frontiers. youtu.be/4g_1_AWOVpI

Are these p values reasonable? They seem very small. Quote: "One-way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s multiple comparison test is presented based on single measurements averaged for each group. P values are indicated." - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A correction to a 2026 Nature paper. This is PubPeer working quite well (in my view at least). I spotted the error and the authors corrected the paper and replied on PubPeer to update. If I had to complain I would rather the correction referenced the PubPeer comment. pubpeer.com/publications...

Retracted today from Scientific Reports following my comments. Graphene oxide against cancer cells. The unlikely collaboration involved authors from Ethiopia, Chile, India, China, and South Korea. Two of the diagrams were easily identifiable as AI slop.

Catching up with MDPI corrections. A published meta-analysis accidentally compared body fat in the probiotic group to weight in the control group. Unsurprisingly comparing two different variables resulted in an obviously wrong forest plot. The authors did correct this after I spotted it.

Good to see that Lorenzo Cohen is still wasting MD Anderson's NIH money on psychic interventions, all peer reviewed of course. From the Materials and Methods: "Briefly, the therapist rapidly cycles through images or symbols of future events they want to have or experience."

Silly correction at Cell Death & Disease. Authors elected to correct just one of these images after accepting that there was an overlapping area, but disputed the other obviously cloned parts. Who accepted the correction at Springer Nature? Sometimes it feels like there are no adults in the loop.